Pottstown meeting set to boost borough-school district cooperation

POTTSTOWN — It won’t just be the location of the joint school board/borough council meeting Tuesday that is unusual.

The agenda is short, unusual in itself, and further, it is focused almost exclusively on breaking down barriers to cooperation.

“We want to set the stage for collaborating, for open communication,” said schools Superintendent Jeff Sparagana who, along with Borough Manager Mark Flanders, met with The Mercury Thursday to outline their efforts.

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“That’s one of the reasons we wanted to have the meeting off-site,” said Flanders. “To put everyone in a setting that encourages participation and interaction.”

After a tour of the new high-tech facility, the borough’s two most significant legislative bodies will hear a presentation on Pottstown’s Keystone Opportunity Zones, the tax-free zones created by the state a decade ago as a way to try to lure businesses into struggling towns.

One business, 84 Lumber, did open a truss plant in a KOZ site on Keystone Boulevard, but it went out of business a few years ago.

Steve Bamford, the executive director of PAID and the man charged with bringing new businesses to Pottstown, recently appeared before both borough council and the school board to get permission to renew the zones for a few years.

His request was made to accommodate a company, Heritage Coach Company, which sells hearses and limousines and wants to occupy the 10-acre 84 Lumber site.

Having the KOZ re-authorized by the borough and school district, would help close the deal, Bamford said.

Flanders and Sparagana said that in addition to being asked for the update to be presented, the item is a perfect example of an issue on which the borough and the school district share common ground, property tax revenue to be exact.

As such, the discussion is the perfect thing to put on an agenda geared toward finding common ground.

The two entities, which have all too often circled each other warily within the same five-square-mile borders of this struggling borough, have found places to cooperate to save money, steps both Sparagana and Flanders say they would like to turn into a trend.

For example, Sparagana asked, “did you know the borough and the school district purchase their stationery paper products jointly, and save taxpayer money doing it?”

Although no one is likely to see their tax bill drop as a result of that particular effort, it shows it can be done and that it is the responsibility of both the borough and the school district to find other places where such savings can be accrued, they said.

“It’s the same people, the same taxpayers, the same pockets” said Flanders. “Our taxpayers are their taxpayers and vice-versa.”

A more recent public example of the borough and school district cooperation is born out of circumstances in which they seemed to be at odds.

The school district’s public complaint about the extra costs being incurred as a result of the borough’s overzealous requirements led to a meeting between Sparagana and Flanders. This, in turn, led to Sparagana’s attendance at a December borough council meeting at which he publicly pledged to work more corroboratively with the borough and to seek understanding before seeking publicity.

And, said both top managers, that situation now has been resolved equitably with the school district agreeing to replace the fire alarm systems at all the remaining elementary schools over the course of the next several years.

“We were always going to put a new system into Rupert,” Sparagana said. “And now, we will phase in the new systems at the other schools, which is what the borough wanted to see, over the next few as we can afford them.”

Having provided some examples of the mutual benefits of cooperation, Flanders and Sparagana hope Tuesday’s joint meeting will get buy-in from their boards and help engender more joint efforts.

To nudge things along, a facilitator will be at the joint meeting to engage the members of both boards in an effort to brainstorm other ways the two can contain and/or share costs in order to save money for the taxpayers they share, explained Flanders and Sparagana.

“We want to get everyone to the place where we recognize that we benefit most by working cooperatively because we all share the same risks,” he said.